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Lindsay Abrams

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June 28, 2013 PROBLEM: "Constant stress puts your health at risk," warns the Mayo Clinic. Meanwhile HuffPo not-helpfully chimes in with "10 Scary Things Stress is Doing to Your Body." Does anyone else get the feeling that stressing over the health impact of how stressed you are just might be counterproductive? METHODOLOGY: Back ...

April 29, 2013 PROBLEM: There has been a lot of interest lately in ways we can use Internet behavior to monitor public health. Facebook likes seem to be a good tool for this -- researchers have already figured out how to use interests expressed on the site to make strong inferences about users' ...

April 11, 2013 PROBLEM: Google overhyped the flu this year, which seemed to be a blow to the company's claim that it can track disease in real-time. Not to mention, the CDC was doing a fine job monitoring the virus's spread without the help of Google's search-based analysis. Traditional epidemiological surveillance techniques are ...

January 17, 2013 Electronic medical records are not working like they should -- or could -- according to a new analysis in Health Affairs that revisited previous predictions for the EMR revolution and found disappointing results, in terms of efficiency,saved costs, and patient care. The practical concerns pointed out by the study include ...

December 12, 2012 Every day -- and through the night -- in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, doctors report to work in a hospital where there are no patients. And in over 70 rural communities in four states, patients stricken by heart attacks, or injured in car accidents, or facing other urgent health issues ...

December 10, 2012 "What I tell patients is, if you like coffee, go ahead and drink as much as you want and can," says Dr. Peter Martin, director of the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt University. He's even developed a metric for monitoring your dosage: If you are having trouble sleeping, cut ...

October 23, 2012 I found my new favorite restaurant shortly after moving to D.C. by reading online reviews from locals who promised it was great for vegetarians. They even called its food "slap yo mama good." Next up on my to-do list for settling down in a new city? Finding a doctor. And ...

October 2, 2012 The name of the Food and Drug Adminsitration's new public awareness campaign, "BeSafeRx," has the same ring to it as the websites you aren't supposed to be trusting: "expressrx4les," "healthydrugsonline," "ineedmypill.com" and 10,000 others that the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy identified and recommends against. It also comes off, ...